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My 2014 Roundup

My 2014 Roundup

2014 is coming to an end, and I would like to begin an annual roundup or a brief summary of what I have achieved and what I can do better at/did not manage to achieve. At the beginning of 2014, I set the following goals:-

Set up an ecommerce function for my Digital Marketing Agency

Set up a forum – Alchemist’s Lab for online marketing topics

Run 4 physical courses in 2014

50k Revenue

5 Authority websites

1 Business book per month

1 short trip

Set up an commerce function for my Digital Marketing Agency
I came to realize that having an commerce function for my digital marketing agency is a bad idea because it might hurt the E-Alchemists branding. Initially, I wanted to have an ecommerce function so that people could just purchase SEO, web development and social media marketing services. As a digital marketing agency is purely business to business, having an ecommerce function is useless, because most businesses will pay you via cheques or internet banking. They won’t use a credit card to purchase your services. So I’ve dropped this idea since the beginning of march.

Setup forum Alchemist’s Lab for online marketing topics

Setting up a forum is a tough job because is hard to bring in members, I tried it out for 2 months but then I decided to quit. Firstly, I didn’t have enough content to feed the forum. Secondly, it is tough to manage. Forming a community requires a lot of hard work – time commitment being one of them, and a lot of it goes into dealing with spammy accounts every day.

So instead of setting up a forum I set up a niche site mastermind. Setting up a mastermind is much more harder because you need everyone to commit time. I discontinued the mastermind because I didn’t have the time to organize it.

Run 4 physically course in 2014

This is something I’ve always wanted to do because I like to teach. Due to time constraints I did not do anything about this except set up the sales page. I will be promoting this again for the next year’s 2015 goal.

50k Revenues

In the beginning of the year from January to June, I was so busy with the authority site and I didn’t make any effort doing in doing sales for my Digital Marketing Agency. Thanks to recurring income from SEO and web hosting, the business is still able to run by itself.

I lost 2 major clients for SEO services in June. This was a wake up call for me and I decided to focus on sales for my digital marketing agency. Thanks goodness, we managed to hit the 50k revenues target – and even higher.

This taught me a lesson: if you believe in something, you can do it.

5 Authority Sites

I thought my team and I could create 5 authority sites for this year, however one authority site already took up our time so much, that I already found it tough to manage. You guys can read about the dark side of having managing an authority site. So setting that goal was a bit crazy and not realistic.

1 Business Book per month

I didn’t have the time to do this, in fact I had already bought the books that I wanted to read. I am just lacking the motivation to read it. This is something I am still working on and if you have any ideas on how to create that motivation to read, feel free to drop a comment below.

1 Short Trip

Yup this is the family goal for this year. But ever since my daughter starting going to childcare, it has been a NIGHTMARE for us – she was falling sick almost every month, some quite serious to the extent where she had to stay at home for a week. Due to that, we decided to go for a staycation at a hotel instead of going for a short trip.

Signing off

As you can see, I failed to accomplish most of the goals. One of the main reason was that I set the goals without any action plan, and some were just too ambitious. For the coming 2015, I will be including my goal progress along with my monthly income report . This is just for declaring my goal publicly to help me achieve it.

How about you? Have you accomplished all the goals that you have set for 2014? I’d be glad if you could share with me what you’ve learnt!